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"Reporting For The Enemy"by New York Post Washingto bureau chief Deborah Orin has been making the blog rounds. It's really good, and you should read it all. She says, in part:

THE video only lasts four minutes or so — grue some scenes of torture from the days when Saddam Hussein's thugs ruled Abu Ghraib prison. I couldn't bear to watch, so I walked out until it was over.
Some who stayed wished they hadn't. They told of savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade — all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam's praises.

Saddam's henchmen took the videos as newsreels to document their deeds in honor of their leader.

But these awful images didn't show up on American TV news.

In fact, just four or five reporters showed up for the screening at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which says it got the video via the Pentagon. Fewer wrote about it ...

AEI spokeswoman Veronique Rodman, puzzled by the minimal interest in the Saddam torture video, is sure that if it was a video of equally horrific torture committed by U.S. troops, the press would find ways to show or report it.

Reporters have to face up to the fact that right now, if we highlight the wrongs that Americans commit but not — out of squeamishness — the far worse horrors committed by others, we become propaganda tools for the other side.

At the beginning of the year, Bush's economic policies overshadowed all other issues in news coverage. However, since April, the networks have practically abandoned coverage of his economic policy - even as the economy and labor market have shown signs of significant improvement.

Of course that paragraph should read "... networks have practically abandoned coverage of his economic policy because the economy and labor market have shown signs of significant improvement."

At the beginning of the year, the Democrat mantra was, "This election will be about jobs, jobs, jobs." But now that we have added 1.4 million new jobs since last fall, all we hear from the press is silence, silence, silence.

I suppose the best way to characterize Ray's music is "soul". Others had used "genius" to describe him, but you can be a genius and not have soul.

Ray reached the top when he quit imitating others and became himself. After a string of somewhat disappointing records for the tiny Swingtime label, they released him from his contract (it was his first; he was 19 years old when he signed it). The execs told him that he sounded too much like Charles Brown when he sang jump blues, and too much like Nat 'King' Cole when he sang ballads. We don't need a copycat artist, they told him.

At Atlantic, he finally found his style in gospel-tinged vocals and hard-swinging piano playing. He was also a decent alto sax player, and would keep his alto around his neck while he sang and played piano, and would blow an alto chorus after his piano chorus and inbetween his vocals. If James Brown was the hardest working man in showbusiness, Ray was certainly pushing for second. And what a band - David "Fathead" Newman on tenor sax and Marcus Belgrave on trumpet. Sweet.

He was an unbelievable performer of ballads, and I mean slow, S--L--O--W ballads, the kind that are just a killer to play, especially if you are the drummer. Dizzy Gillespie said in an interview long ago that on one gig with Ray, Dizzy picked up his trumpet and began walking across the stage when Ray counted off a ballad and said "One ... " Diz remembered getting all the way across the stage and putting his trumpet up to his lips by the time Ray said "Two..." And he expected his drummer and his band to follow him together on tempos that slow. Dizzy call them "death tempos". But when Ray was on, and those ballads flowed from his keyboard and lips, the effect was mesmerizing.

Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music (ABC Paramount) - the first soul country album, a truly landmark effort that showed that you could play even those cornball 3-chord country tunes with as much soul and feeling as Sunday morning church meeting. Spawned a lot of copycat albums (Nat King Cole's "Ramblin' Rose" comes to mind) but none surpassed this one. Great band and arrangements, too.

The Great Ray Charles (Atlantic) - Another album that concentrated on Charles as an instrumentalist and on his superb band, this time featuring Hank Crawford and David "Fathead" Newman.

The Genius of Ray Charles (Atlantic) - WHEW! Man, this has to be the most intensely swinging set of songs I've ever heard Ray do. Side one is recorded with a studio group that is the Count Basie Orchestra, minus the Count, and with Clark Terry and Paul Gonsalves from Duke Ellington's band thrown in for a little fun, and MAN, they BLOW! I've often wondered if there was any paint left on the walls of the studio after this session got through. They came to play on this one. Side Two is one of the most enjoyable sets of ballads that Ray ever recorded, arranged for a large string orchestra by Ralph Burns and featuring Ray at his tender best. What a contrast to side One. But it really works.

Go ye and buy them all.

UPDATE - Amazon.com seems to indicate that "Soul Meeting" is out of print. Too bad.

I have enjoyed reading the numerous commentaries about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. I am convinced that he will go down in history as the greatest President in the last half of the 20th century, and follow only Franklin Roosevelt as the greatest president of the entire 20th century.

In my earlier post I failed to mention the other quality that made Reagan such a great leader: his amazing ability to communicate an idea in simple and direct language.

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

No other Western leader had ever possessed the courage to demand this simple act of justice, to plainly define the difference between freedom and imprisonment. Reagan himself wrote, in a later introduction to his famous "Evil Empire" speech, "I've always believed, however, that it's important to define differences, because there are choices and decisions to be made in life and history."

I believe that this talent was what ultimately made him the subject of so much vile hatred from the political left. He was able, with just a few plainly worded sentences, to cut through all of their platitudes and 'feel good'-isms and flimsy philosophies and expose the emptiness and errors in their thinking.

"Sen. [Joseph] Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government. Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government"--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose."

"We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they are going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. "

"This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. "

Reagan said many, many more great things. But I believe that these short excerpts illustrate his understanding of freedom and the destructive forces of socialism and communism.

I mentioned in my previous post that supply-side economics was anathema to leftists and socialists. Virtually everything Reagan believed was vilified by these people, but he had the courage to stand up in the face of truly difficult times and plainly deliver a set of ideas that he knew would be rejected by every major newspaper editorial room, every university faculty, and every non-democratic foreign government. Because the left simply can't compute a set of values different from theirs, they wrote Reagan off as an idiot, a man far too stupid to govern - after all, how could any intelligent person actually want to defeat communism, the greatest intellectual triumph of the 19th century? And no educated person could take a man seriously after he suggested that individuals were far better off if they could decide their own fate. Didn't all reasonable men understand that superior intellect produces ideas of surpassing greatness such that the mere uneducated masses could never hope to achieve?

What Reagan truly understood was that "superior intellect" creates central governments with no accountability to their citizens, which then produce a juggernaut of endless bureaucracy that erodes the wealth of nations without replenishing it, and which must eventually subjugate the lives of its citizens in order to insure its own survival. Every centralized bureaucracy created in the twentieth century, from the Soviet Union to the United Nations to the European Union has followed this pattern without fail, though not all have reached the point of resorting to oppression. Nowhere have self-righteous elites created any centralized system of government that has worked so well as the American republic with a free market economy.

Reagan had no qualms about standing up to the elites in virtually every area of domestic and foreign policy - taxation, judicial appointments, rebuilding the military, holding fast against Soviet aggression - and just politely shrugged them off with a simple, "Well, there they go again." And he did this with an irresistable sunny optimism.

A Democrat friend once asked me if I believed that liberals loved America. I answered yes, I believed that liberals loved America but it was a love that also contained equal parts shame, frustration, and a strong sense of underachievement. Because elitists have long considered themselves morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, they could not look at America - a democratic society that actually gave uneducated citizens the power to choose Neanderthal conservatives as government leaders - and see a nation that had even remotely realized its true potential. Only if we were governed by the correct people, who then led this nation to socialize and redistribute its resources both home and abroad, and then led the ranks of secularist European governments in pursuing a foreign policy of disarmament, negotiation, and appeasement, could America ever be a great nation.

But Reagan truly loved America for what it was and is. He loved the people, he loved their freedom and their ability to make their own choices about how they would live their own lives and how they would be governed. He did not want to change any of these traits, he wanted only to make them stronger. He believed that America had not yet reached its potential, but his solution was more freedom and more wealth. He steadfastly believed that exporting freedom and democracy and capitalism was the only way to truly make the world a better place. He wanted to see America succeed, and he wanted to see the world succeed. He believed in success, and this was the true source of his optimism.

He believed that there was a difference between good and evil, and that this difference sould be explicitly defined and that these definitions should be repeated as often as necessary. He believed that individuals and governments should be responsible for their actions, and that blame and victimization and navel-gazing did not solve problems.

For this, he was called an idiot, a cowboy, a unilateralist, a warmonger, a homophope, anti-civil rights, an ignorant puppet controlled by an evil cabal of advisors.

But what he really was, was a hero.

A LAST THOUGHT - I did not mention the horrible disservice and smear-job given to Reagan by militant gays, who solely blame him for the spread of AIDS during the 1980's. But Andrew Sullivan has a pretty good comment about this on his blog today.

He's finally gone. Not a surprise, really, since he had been away from us for the last few years due to the cruelties of Alzheimer's disease. Having had personal experience dealing with loved ones who had long-term debilitating diseases, I can safely say that his death probably comes partly as a relief to his family, who now know that his suffering is finally over.

Special mention should be made of Nancy Reagan, who gave up the cocktail parties and social events to live virtually as a recluse, at her beloved Ronnie's side, caring for him every day until he died. That's love.

Of course the AP news story had to make a swipe at their relationship, stating "Reagan lived longer than any U.S. president, spending his last decade in the shrouded seclusion wrought by his disease, tended by his wife, Nancy, whom he called Mommy, and the select few closest to him." (Emphasis mine.) So what? My wife and I have a 3 year old and a 1 1/2 year old, and we constantly call each other "Mommy" and "Daddy". My parents still called each other "Mom" and "Dad" even after I graduated from college. It's old-school, probably not Baby-Boomer "hip" to do that, but I think it's quaint and beautiful.

The AP had to take another swipe at Reagan by again perpetuating the biggest left-wing lie about the Reagan presidency - "Over two terms, from 1981 to 1989, Reagan reshaped the Republican Party in his conservative image, fixed his eye on the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism and tripled the national debt to $3 trillion in his single-minded competition with the other superpower." (Emphasis added.)

The billion-dollar spending sprees and a continual string of broken promises on fiscal responsibility by the Democrat-controlled Congress had nothing to do with the deficit spending, right?

Here is the truth:

1) Reagan never "slashed" taxes. He passed one major tax rate reduction bill in 1981, and another smaller one in 1986, but in every successive year from 1982 to 1988 he signed legislation that increased taxes in one form or another. Economics columnist Bruce Bartlett writes:

Reagan may have resisted calls for tax increases, but he ultimately supported them. In 1982 alone, he signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year and the Highway Revenue Act raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.

In 1983, Reagan signed legislation raising the Social Security tax rate. This is a tax increase that lives with us still, since it initiated automatic increases in the taxable wage base. As a consequence, those with moderately high earnings see their payroll taxes rise every single year.

In 1984, Reagan signed another big tax increase in the Deficit Reduction Act. This raised taxes by $18 billion per year or 0.4 percent of GDP. A similar-sized tax increase today would be about $44 billion.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 raised taxes yet again. Even the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was designed to be revenue-neutral, contained a net tax increase in its first 2 years. And the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 raised taxes still more.

The year 1988 appears to be the only year of the Reagan presidency, other than the first, in which taxes were not raised legislatively. Of course, previous tax increases remained in effect. According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP. This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today's economy.

I say all this not to besmirch Reagan's reputation, but simply to set the record straight.

Reagan believed that if the citizens who "supplied" economic capital were allowed to keep and spend more of their own money, then the overall amount of wealth in the economy would grow, and this increased economic growth would produce more tax revenue, which would then lead to smaller government debt. This is the heart of "supply-side" economic theory. Still, he was responsible for a variety of tax rate increases during his presidency. The idea that his tax policies drained the government of money is pure nonesense.

2) There were no draconian "budget cuts". Reagan discussed and proposed many funding decreases for various programs, but the budget for every major Federal entitlement program rose continually during the 1980's. Nobody got short-changed. The only thing that pissed Democrats off more than the success of Reagan's tax rate reductions in spurring tax revenue was that they couldn't increase entitlement spending even more than they actually did.

3) Reagan's two Federal income tax reductions (1981 and 1986) did not wreck the economy by choking off tax revenues and creating a massive government debt. While supply-side economics centered around working citizens (the actual wealth-producers and "suppliers" of capital) keeping more of what they earned, it also was dependent on the idea that excess taxation dampened the economy. When taxes reached a certain percentage of overall income, people would hide assets or engage in an underground trading system to avoid taxes, and these things would reduce the overall amount of capital available in the economy. Under supply-side theory, economic lulls (like the stagflation and misery years of the Carter administration) could be corrected by lowering tax rates. Reagan did it, and it worked like gangbusters.

Federal debt increased because of heavy spending increases, not because of changes in tax revenue. Actually, the revenue collected by the Federal government jumped from around $550 billion in 1980 to almost $1 trillion in 1990. This article by Dr. Judd Patton of Bellevue University explains the ideas behind supply-side economics nicely. I would also recommend former Wall Street Journal executive editor Robert Bartley's excellent book "The Seven Fat Years."

Naturally this remains a subject of intense debate, with socialists and Keynesians unable to concede a single point to supply side economics. Because supply side economics was anathema to them (it limited the government's ability to redistribute income and put average citizens more in charge of their own spending) they created the phony derogatory term "trickle down economics." If you want the other point of view on this idea, go read anything by Paul Krugman. As for me, I simply say that these guys had their way during the entire decade of the 1970's (Nixon was a Keynesian - "wage and price controls" ring a bell, anyone?) and the Keynesians blew it big-time. Reagan's ideas worked.

4) Defense spending did increase under Reagan's guidance, but it did not strip one dollar away from entitlement programs, and it remained far below military spending as a portion of the GDP during the initial phases of the Cold War in the 1950's and 1960's. Don't believe me? Check it out here.

The beauty of Reagan's accomplishment is that under his leadership, America managed to grow both its domestic economy and build its military strength at the same time. This proved to be the death knell for the Soviet Union, whose economy was on the brink of collapse after they tried to match Reagan's arms buildup.

Reagan also restored a sense of pride and leadership that was sorely lacking under Jimmy Carter. While Carter was the darling of the intellectual left, his policies of negotiation, appeasement, excessive government regulation, and economic micromanagement were a disaster. Reagan had three simple goals that anyone could understand - Defeat Communism, Restore the economy, and make America a leader again. Of course this horrified leftists, who believed that America was responsible for every ill in the world and in no way deserved to be a leader, and who fervently prayed for the defeat of capitalism and the ascent of Communism as the world's leading economic and social policy. Fortunately, the citizens of this country sided with Reagan and gave him a chance in 1980.

For all of the liberal handwringing about starving our children in order to build bombs, it is worth remembering that Reagan's strengthened military wiped out Saddam Hussein in 1991, and provided the Clinton administration with both the techology and ordinance to bomb Kosovo, Sarajevo, and Baghdad repeatedly during the 1990's.

Liberals who so vehemently hated Reagan never forgave him for his 1984 Presidential campaign slogan, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" They constantly insisted that the "majority" of people would answer "no", and yet Reagan won the '84 election with the largest electoral college landslide in American history. He also exited the White House with the highest modern-era approval ratings of any President.

That should tell you something.

Goodbye, Mr. Reagan. We'll miss you, but what you did will light the way for this country for decades to come.

There has been a lot of writing among conservatives about the op-ed piece in today's Guardian by former New York Times editor in chief Howl - er - Howell Raines. His piece urges John Kerry to fabricate a feel-good economic plan as a winning campaign strategy. Raines' reasoning behind this idea is:

Two and a quarter centuries into its history as a nation, America has the most unfair tax system ever and the greatest gap ever between rich and poor ... Americans aren't antagonistic toward the rules that protect the rich because they think that in the great crap-shoot of economic life in America, they might wind up rich themselves. It's a mass delusion, of course, but one that has worked ever since Ronald Reagan got Republicans to start flaunting their wealth instead of apologising for it.

Woah, Nellie. Let's review Raines' worldview for just a second.

- America has the most unfair tax system ever
- America has the greatest gap between the rich and the poor
- Americans should apologize for their wealth
- Life in America is an economic crap shoot
- The idea that Americans can economically better themselves is a mass delusion, of course!

Based on this, Raines believes that the majority of Americans are greedy and crave government programs that promise to make them wealthy when they retire. And that's why Americans have voted Republican for the last ten years.

There are so many holes in these theories that it is difficult to know where to begin analyzing them. But perhaps the most important thing (as so many other writers have pointed out) is that this is the worldview of the editor-in-chief of the New York Times. This is the worldview that determines which articles are published, how these articles are edited, how reporters and opinion writers are hired, and that ultimately determines the trajectory of the whole content of the newspaper.

Could a man who is so openly Socialist and anti-American ever assemble a newspaper that is objective in the scope of its reporting? Of course Raines is gone now, but in the few brief months since he has left, could any real changes have taken place at the paper, particularly since most of the staff that he hired and managed is still in place?

Just for the record, to anyone who reads this blog and doesn't understand just how wrong Raines' Socialism is, here are a few things to think about ...

If you think that the "gap between the rich and poor" keeps growing, you are looking it from a completely wrong perspective. Sure, if you compared the assets of the richest man in America in 1804 with the assets of Bill Gates in 2004, and then compared these to the rock bottom condition of destitute pennilessness, you might think that the rich have grown richer while penniless is still penniless.

But this growth is due to the growth in the size of the economy during the last 200 years. Americans are among the wealthiest citizens in the world in terms of capital owned by average citizens. Average American citizens own trillions of dollars worth of real estate, securities, and business assets. Ask yourself, would you want to be an average citizen in Zimbabwe or North Korea or Cuba, or an average citizen in the United States. What do you think the net worth (capital, securities, currency, and yes, debts) of the average Cuban is compared to the average American?

And the miracle of this is that we continually acquire assets during our whole working lives. Only a handful of truly broken poverty cases are born poor, grow up poor, raise their children in poverty, retire in poverty, and die in poverty. The typical American begins work at the entry level and then progresses continually in tenure and salary. He may switch jobs several times (unfortunately some of these switches may not be voluntary) but over the years his average earnings will continually increase. Many Americans leave the workplace with knowledge and experience and start their own businesses. Some fail, but most succeed, and these citizens create both wealth and employment opportunities for new workers.

There is no "crap shoot" in which some minority of Americans "wind up rich" by accident. The only sector of business that even remotely works this way is Hollywood, where an unknown can become a million-dollar superstar overnight. But for the rest of us hard work, determination, and smart money management are what generates wealth.

I wonder if Howell Raines feels that the position of NYT editor is just a crapshoot. I wonder if he believes that any wino in Central Park could have ended up with his job through the right twists of fate. I wonder if Raines, in a fit of guilt, would have turned over his job to just anyone, because after all he "wound up" there by accicent, right? And certainly he didn't deserve his six-figure salary. Couldn't that money have been used to help the poor men whom Raines screwed out of a job and left in the gutter?

Of course not. The only men who are more wrong than the likes of Raines are those who actually expect him to practice what he preaches.

For a Conservative, agreeing with Alan Dershowitz is just plain hard. But this time he seems to make a lot of sense: Rules of War Enable Terror.

The "Geneva Conventions" have been used to whip and bully the US as we attempt to destroy terrorists. Last week, Amnesty International brazenly declared, "The US-led war on terror has produced the most sustained attack on human rights and international law in 50 years." This would be funny if it was sourced back to The Onion, but it really happened.

Here's what's wrong with the Geneva Conventions. First, probably only the Bible and the USA Patriot Act would rival the GC's as the most quoted but least read document in modern times. If you want to be one of the few individuals who has acutally read it, just go here.

Second, if you read the document, you will immediately understand that it applies to conventional warfare fought by uniformed armies and under the generally accepted rules of combat. The GC's do not apply to terrorists.

Third, the conventions are designed to be a reciprocal agreement, a gentlemen's agreement really - I'll abide by them under the condition that you'll abide by them.

A few weeks ago, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on a civilian vehicle being driven by a pregnant Jewish mother and her four daughters, age 2 to 11. After disabling the vehicle, the terrorists converged on the occupants and proceeded to slaughter them with gunfire at point-blank range.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, Part II, Article 14, states:

In time of peace, the High Contracting Parties and, after the outbreak of hostilities, the Parties thereto, may establish in their own territory and, if the need arises, in occupied areas, hospital and safety zones and localities so organized as to protect from the effects of war, wounded, sick and aged persons, children under fifteen, expectant mothers and mothers of children under seven.

Do our terrorist enemies offer any respect or obedience to the Conventions? You be the judge. (I would also suspect that sawing off Nick Berg's head with a hunting knife also runs afoul of the GC's guidelines.)

Anyway, Dershowitz writes:

Whenever a civilian is accidentally killed or an ambulance is held up at a checkpoint, the terrorist leaders, and those who support them, have exploited the post-World War II laws of warfare to condemn the democracies for violating the letter of the law. Some human rights groups, international organizations and churches have joined this chorus of condemnation, equating the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians by terrorists with the unintended consequences of trying to combat terrorism - unintended by the democracies, but quite specifically intended, indeed provoked by, the terrorists. This only encourages more terrorism, since the terrorists receive a double benefit from their actions. First they benefit from killing "enemy" civilians. Second, they benefit from the condemnation heaped on their enemies. Human rights are thus being used to promote human wrongs.

He offers a number of suggestions, including:

Civilians who are killed while being used as human shields by terrorists must be deemed the victims of the terrorists who have chosen to hide among them, rather than those of the democracies who may have fired the fatal shot.

Now will anyone else listen? I'm always hopeful, but as usual I am not holding my breath.

Here is an excerpt from a Polish-language interview with Marek Edelman, a Polish Jew who is the last surviving member of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Edelman returned to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (the most lethal and successful uprising against Nazi occupation) and fought the Communist Party forty years later as a member of Solidarity. Thanks to blogger Cherenkoff who provides the English translation on his blog:

Interviewer: What about the photos from Abu Ghraib - don't they cause you to start question that American democracy?

Edelman: Well, it happened. Among several hundred thousand American soldiers there were a few perverts...

Interviewer: But the incident nevertheless seriously damaged America's standing. What to say to Polish people after the death of several more of our soldiers?

Edelman: But they died fighting for their freedom. How many thousands of people died in the Warsaw Uprising [in 1944]?

Interviewer: But those people then were fighting for their country.

Edelman: They were fighting for their world. Free and democratic. Just like those who died during the martial law [in Poland in 1981-3]. Did they die only for Poland? No. They died for the freedom of the whole Europe, for the freedom of all those enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.

Interviewer: But the Spanish withdrew their troops from Iraq after the terrorist attack in Madrid.

Edelman: Please don't tell me what the Spanish did. So what? Do you seriously think that it will save them from further attacks? No. The weak just get punched in the head. Pacifism lost a long time ago.

Interviewer: There are more and more voices saying that Poland shouldn't work so close with the Americans and that instead we should get closer to France and Germany.

Edelman: France used to be a great power, culturally and intellectually. And what happened to them? They didn't want to fight for their own democracy, they thought it wasn't really their war [in 1939]. And they lost everything, because when you bend over and take it - even once - then you're finished.